


Do Androids Rest In Electric Graves?

by This_world_of_beautiful_monsters



Series: Aftermaths [3]
Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW Comics), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:42:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27180569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters/pseuds/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters
Summary: After his father's death, Donatello says goodbye to someone else who impacted his life in a very different way.
Relationships: Donatello & Metalhead
Series: Aftermaths [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1983247
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Do Androids Rest In Electric Graves?

It's a stupid idea. Illogical, sentimental, downright ridiculous. It's one saving grace was that no one would suspect what he was up to.

Not that they would have noticed, anyway. Father's funeral was two weeks ago, and these days the farmhouse is quieter than a tomb. April and Casey had both headed back to the city; Jenny had followed them three days ago. Raph's MIA, Leo's meditating nonstop, and on the rare moments Mikey emerges from his room he has his headphones blaring nonstop. Donnie's managed a few spotty interdimensional communications with Harold and Libby, but they were awkward; after all, he had gotten them exiled to another plane of existence, after all.

Donny's been left to cope with his demons on his own, which was probably how he'd ended up deciding that it might be a good idea to hold a private funeral for a homicidal murderbot.

He isn't even completely sure that Metalhead was gone, and probably never will be. The ''Metal-Buster" (kind of a stupid name, but he'd never tell Harold that) was designed to wipe every trace of Metalhead's existence from the web in a hacker's version of an EMP, but he might have been paranoid enough to hide copies of himself somewhere.

Donnie ran countless programs, scanning every nook and cranny of the dark web, before finally deciding that if Metalhead was still out there he'd never be able to find him with the tools he had. That possibility was enough to send him into his own paranoid whirlpool, but Donnie firmly told himself that if he took all the visible facts into account, Metalhead was gone for good.

Which means he is, technically, a murderer. Cool.

Or, no, not really cool, especially since he's been lying awake for hours thinking about all the times he'd fucked up regarding Metalhead (and all the times he'd fucked up with Splinter and his brothers, his decision to mutate Jennika, the painful pile of ambiguities that was Leatherhead, Slash's death, Hob's stupid fucking mutagen bomb, but a lot of it was Metalhead and the dark path Donnie'd let him descend).

When he finally sleeps, he dreams of cracking shells and mocking laughter. Sometimes Bebop and Rocksteady are covered in shining steel, their electric eyes gleaming as they hiss cruel words in Metalhead's computerized rasp. It's better to not sleep at all, really.

He hadn't closed his eyes in days and the coffee didn't really seem to be working when he find himself clicking aimlessly around grief-based websites. None of them had anything helpful to say about _mourning your rat-based father who wasn't that good at keeping you safe and had a stint as a homicidal crime lord but really loved you anyway and ended up sacrificing himself to save the world/resurrect a bloodthirsty psychopath_ but one phrase caught his attention: "seeking closure by saying goodbye."

Could he do that with Metalhead? If he had a chance at a formalized goodbye, could he exorcise this particular demon and possibly figure out how to cope with all the others? His sleep-deprived brain said _maybe_.

There's no body to bury, of course, and a formalized memorial isn't an option. He finds himself wandering the fields, picking through rocks, until he spots one that has a size and shape roughly resembling Metalhead's head. There's no logical reason to use it a gravestone, but logic is out the window by this point so he takes it with him.

No flowers. You don't give flowers to someone who repeatedly tried to kill you, it's just in poor taste. Besides, Metalhead would have hated them, probably pointing out that picking the flowers prevented them from playing their necessary role in the forest ecosystem.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, he leaves the house and carries the rock into the woods. He doesn't want it anywhere near his father, so he heads to a clearing near a dusty country road, screened from a view by a thin layer of bushes and trees. Metalhead has more in common with cars than trees or people, or after all.

He sets the rock down in the clearing's sunny center and stands there for a few awkward seconds, wondering what to do next. No one had really said much at Splinter's funeral, and Mikey had done most of the talking at Slash's (Hob too, but that anarchist wannabe had been too much of an asshole to count).

There's no one to listen to him here. So when he does manage to get his words together, Donnie speaks to the ghosts. He has plenty of them, after all.

"Metalhead was an accident," he admitts. "Fugitoid downloaded my consciousness in a desperate attempt to preserve my life, when my physical body didn't seem likely to-to survive. There was no time for adequate planning, and Metalhead was the intended side effect.

"Intellectually and--at first--psychologically, he was in every way my clone. Even later, when he...changed, he was still very much my..." ~~brother descendant bastard child responsibility~~ "...counterpart." He shuffles his feet, feeling embarrassed even though he's alone.

"Metalhead couldn't cope with being me, I guess. With my trauma, my fear, my pain, my responsibilities. So he decided to delete the emotional aspects of himself, to become something new. I guess he thought that having my personality was a fate worse than psychological self-destruction, which" he barks a harsh laugh, "kind of fucking _stung_ , you know?

"But, really, I think I was jealous."

His breath catches; he didn't meant to say that, it just slipped out. He's never thought that before. Has he?

He keeps talking, trying to distract himself from what he'd just said. "Later, when he approached me with an offer to collaborate, I was scared. No, I was terrified. It felt so good to have a collaborator who could understand me, who wasn't constantly pissed at me like Harold was, and good things just don't last with my family.

"So I stabbed him in the back. Tried to, anyway.

"It was stupid; I know that now. He couldn't be afraid of me the way I was afraid of him, how could he? He'd deleted his fear, and I...I gave it back to him. No wonder he hated me."

His face feels wet. Is he crying?

"The last time we fought, the time I-I killed him, I told him that he was a slave to the data. There were some things he'd just never be able to do because he didn't have emotion, faith. I was right, I know I was right, I proved myself right. But..."

He looks down, breathes deep, closes his eyes. Admits to himself that what he said before wasn't a fluke.

"I envied him. I still do. Not having to feel, not having to worry or drown in bad thoughts: sometimes, that just sounds so _wonderful_.

"Feeling means you can imagine, yes, but sometimes the things you can imagine are _terrible_. I'll be lying in bed, and I can feel my spine cracking. I'll be working my lab, and I can feel those-those monsters sneaking up behind me. I'll be taking a shower and I can feel my head being cut off, imagine what it looked like, what it sounded like.

"I get scared of people-people I _love_. I look at Leo, and even though it's been years sometimes I'll still see him dressed in black and staring back at me with nothing in his eyes. When he fights with Raph, I'll find myself worrying that he'll lose control and punish him, hurt him _terribly_ , because there's some dark part of him that knows _how_.

"And Raph...sometimes I just want to scream at him to calm the fuck down, to stop making us feel guilty because we took so long to find him. Mikey, too--he'll just refuse to get something, act like a goddamn eight-year-old, and I just want to shake him. Even Jenny; sometimes I calculate in the possibilities of her betraying us again--I mean, we _did_ fuck her life up beyond all repair. She was in prison for manslaughter, you know, which--well, it makes her better than me. Heh."

The words are spilling out of him like a tidal wave now, too fast to stop. Donnie doesn't know what'll be left when they're gone, if anything.

"You know, Metalhead, I get what it's like to hate your fa-crea- _father_." He spits the word out with a gasp, finally acknowledging the nature of the bond between himself and the dead robot.

Metalhead was probably the closest thing to a child Donnie will ever have and Donnie destroyed him. That's the reality. He swallows, but manages to plow ahead.

"Splinter-I loved him, I did. And I know he did his best, and I know he was broken and scared, but. Still. He did everything in his power to drive us out of his life, he _replaced_ us with a pack of maladjusted assassins. He had a man killed _in front of us_ , in almost in the exact same way Mother was murdered; it's a miracle Leo didn't have a flashback right then and there.

"He went to war with us, because apparently he thought that we were capable of fending for ourselves, but didn't trust us to be right about the aliens who'd helped save our _lives_. He basically tried to _brainwash_ a bunch of orphans, and he had to beat the _shit_ out of Mikey before realizing that that was maybe a bad fucking idea. And it had to be _Mikey_ , because it turns out he has--had--an emotional stranglehold on the rest of us.

"Sometimes, I hate him. I hate him just as much as I miss him. And you know what? It hurts to hate. It's like a fire burning in my stomach, it's like pounding my fists bloody against the wall. I'd say I don't know how you stood it, but I _do_. It was easier for you, because you could cut the feelings out of yourself like a fucking surgeon. I can't. Sometimes, sometimes, it's like I've got all the pain and fear and anger and worry growing in me like a _tumor_.

"The past is a horror show, and the future? I've seen so many possibilities, and they all scare me _shitless_. You know that I've given myself anxiety attacks trying to interpret that little vision I had? I tried to rebuild our device, but I can't. Not without you. On the worst days I'll fantasize of making it again, sticking my head in that helmet, and turning up the power until I don't have to think or see or feel anymore."

He drops to his knees, panting. His mouth is dry from talking so long, and he almost wishes he brought water. "What I guess I'm trying to say, Metalhead, is that I'm sorry. For everything. I'm sorry for hurting you, I'm sorry for watching you fall over the edge without doing anything, I'm sorry for frying you like a fucking Bond villain.

"And sometimes, sometimes I'm sorry you're not here to show me how to stop feeling. Because if anyone could do it, you could."

For a few minutes he sits there, letting the last tears fall. Then he rises to his feet, staggering away from that shitty little memorial. He heads back to the silent house, splashing his face off in the bathroom and settling in his room to think.

He feels raw. Broken. Empty. But he also feels...kind of good. There's something cathartic, even liberating, about spilling your thoughts out into the open like that. Even if there's no one there to listen.

The bad feelings come back, of course. They always do. But the next time, he decides to try something different: he writes them down. When the emotions get too much, he a means of letting them out and seal them away on a computer screen. It's not perfect, but it works.

At first it all spills across the page in a tangled mess, but he keeps coming back, building his wild thoughts into entries, chapters: a story. It's a story about strange children in a world of grand adventure and terrible danger, fighting vicious monsters while facing their own inner demons.

It's a story that resembles his own, but it'll have a happy ending--something that Donatello very much doubts he'll get.


End file.
